Currently in the UK I can get 2GB memory for £150, so 512MB is £37.50.

Yeah, I thought Tom's price sounded a bit low.

It seems that you think I talk a lot of nonsense Kassen (well judging from all the 'nice words' in this thread), but like usual, you are mistaken yet again (it's just obvious to me that you are shopping in the wrong places folks )

MacPro memory is a bit more expensive, the figure I quoted was from Crucial

Erm, Jan, do I understand correctly that I could boot my Amstrad PPC512 straight into Forth, then connect some port's pins to a drum-machine, then livecode this? And that this could conceivably be rather nice as a parlour trick?_________________Kassen

I dont know that Amstrad machine, but basically yes, not a weird idea at all ... I had a Bullet running CP/M and as SCSI was not invented yet it had a SASI port and that one could just be bit banged for general purpose i/o

That Bullet had a boot ROM of 32 bytes, just enough to read the first sector from a floppy and to jump into it. So when you would have made a forth with block I/O on the floppy it would be easy to boot straight into Forth. I never did it, but it would not be too hard .. wanna buy it _________________Jan
(yawning shifts perceived pitch, making things more interesting)

The only weird thing (well, in this context....)about that Amstrad is the display. That might be a issue, I poked some more and apparently such disks do exist and do exist for various Amstrad's but it's not so clear whether for one this Amstrad exists and if so how to get it. Sadly the internet isn't teeming with disk images for the PPC512.

Alternately I found something called "formula" exists which is a musical OS/Forth-interperter for the Atari but the ST isn't a laptop and not as exotic not does it have empty space in the case.

Thanks for this - didn't know it did what it did. I'll try it next time I get a GUI lockup (which incidentally is all over the desktop - the menu bar included - and the "task bar" or whatever it's called refuses to appear - I like to keep it hidden). Maybe I should buy some extra memory...

I think it's a bit of a shame that you don't contribute much to the actual topic of this discussion but at least you are taking your current stress out on random people online instead of on your partner and children. That's probably a good choice.

Kassen, please don't assume that I may be beating my wife and kids if I wasn't getting wound up by you. I may speak my mind, be very large (tall) but I am not an aggressive bully. Okay?

However, if you really must know why I haven't posted, it's because I'm just about finished my honours degree- I have about 4 weeks left (+ extensions hopefully). I have a 10,000 word dissertation to finish (5031 words down so far), a 7500 word report to start, well 7334 words, as 166 have already been written and another 8000 word report with a 3D real-time interactive model of a building to complete, complete with coding. Oh yes and a working 3D prototype of a model designed in Solidworks (nothing to do, rather depressingly with music I'm afraid). On top of that I have a £25,000 overdraft to pay off and a mortgage of £78,000 to top and naturally I am bricking it.

But the other reason, and probably my main reason I haven't been posting much, is because I know full well where this thread is going (based on past experience with Kassen and the subject of Apple!), and looks like it already has gone that way anyway.

In a nutshell, I can't really be bothered arguing at the moment or trying to persuade you. To be honest, I'd get a bigger kick watching paint dry However, what I do know, is that my computer works well and if anybody are having problems, it's highly likely that they are either doing something very wrong, or have misread something somewhere. I'm pleased Stefan has learnt something (always nice to know that someone, somewhere got a positive) and I'm gobsmacked with the price of memory for Mac Pro- from what I remember, it always used to be the other way round. Laptop memory was dear, and tower memory cheap. Sorry for the misunderstanding Andy. _________________ACHTUNG!
ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS!
DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKSEN.
IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.
ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.

CP/M: An acronym for Control Program for Microprocessors. CP/M is the ancestor of MS-DOS, the operating system used on IBM PCs and compatibles. Although recognized by many as clumsy and difficult to learn (some maintained that the initials stood for “Conspiracy to Protect the Ministry [of computer initiates]”), at one time CP/M was the most widely used microcomputer operating system — which says something about the way computers have improved over the years. (Ref. 13)

I recall CP/M being cheekily labeled such for its steadfast user-UNfriendliness

And I certainly don't want to go back to it, but at times I do miss the directness of CP/M and the openness of the computer it ran on.

Apart from that, a lot of what is brought as user friendliness today is experienced by me as unfriendly and so I try to turn that off where possible. Hopefully without loosing any of the features that I do appreciate - I do need reinstalls sometimes when I hacked out too much in my ignorance, but I like doing it, so no problem there.

As a windows user I can't judge OSX, but I think that all systems are going the same way essentially (including Linux) and I'm sure that for a majority of users that's a good development, even when it looses some good things over the years.

When I look around the table I'm sitting on I count more than 20 processors, when I look over my shoulders I see another 20 or so ... and I'm really glad all of those are more capable than the z80 the CP/M system had to run on, and I'm glad they have better interfaces where I don't have to first find a floppy that actually can be read and then have to type some magic to make it do the job. The world changes ...

And when I really want to be in control I'll just make some embedded thingie with a DIY compiler & all, but it will not do any word processing then or fog emulations or complex sounds ... I've got some other things I like to do as well._________________Jan
(yawning shifts perceived pitch, making things more interesting)

As a windows user I can't judge OSX, but I think that all systems are going the same way essentially (including Linux)

Word.

Quote:

and I'm sure that for a majority of users that's a good development, even when it looses some good things over the years.

Generally, so far yes. but I'm sticking to my points above about the development of interfaces and I'd like to point out that even the average user is now reluctant to switch to Vista.

There is a price though. "The computer" went from a highly specialised tool to a general purpose thing and now it seems to go back to a sort of specialisation. Some things are extremely easy (say email and chat) others are harder now then they were before (addressing a port directly). As soon as you go off the beaten path things become very hard. Supposedly OSX is more advanced then other Unixes, for example, but a usually easy thing like switching the graphical shell is now near impossible on it. Multitasking used to be a specialised thing, now dedicating the whole PC to a single process has become insanely hard.

Simple stuff is now hard. I think we all agree a Atari ST is primitive by today's standards as is MIDI but will Bob's 4000£ rig be tighter for simple MIDI? Well, maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it, I think the Atari has a fighting chance and it's not worth a single percent of that rig.

Quote:

And when I really want to be in control I'll just make some embedded thingie with a DIY compiler & all, but it will not do any word processing then or fog emulations or complex sounds ... I've got some other things I like to do as well.

Well, colour me young&naive but I actually like "typing magic" and I do want to be in control *and* have complex sounds. Oh, and I want cake. I want cake in stacks, arrays and list with several methods of eating it. Basically I'd like all the technological advances made as well as the advances in cognitive science (where it concerns interfaces) to benefit me as well and not just the majority._________________Kassen

Why do you need the graphical shell to enable this? A option to hit esc at startup or something similar sounds much better, I think.

This way it's useless if your graphical shell collapses and you decide at that moment you would like to go to the terminal to reconfigure it. This can be quite important if -for example- you need to replace a broken monitor by one that doesn't support auto-detect and so needs to be manually configured. I also notice you need to first boot up to a *graphical* interface too select you want only the terminal, a very odd choice.

Do I understand correctly that if Quartz would get deleted or become corrupted you couldn't get into the terminal either? Or does that menu not depend on Quartz? Also; I can't imagine this system of hidden features activated by naming users certain names counts as "intuitive"? I would never have found that on my own, for example._________________Kassen

Before you accuse me of far-fetched scenarios; last week I had a monitor collapse (taking the video-card with it, I think) and it turned out the spare one indeed didn't support auto-detect which meant booting into the terminal to manually configure it because X-server attempted to use it in a mode it didn't support, oh, and my spare video-card was for another kind of slot altogether.

Not a fun exercise but better then not having a monitor at all._________________Kassen

I myself am descended from tribes of hunter-gatherers and the genes of my species haven't changed that much since then. Because of this; if anything moves in my peripheral vision my brain stops to determine whether I should fight, flee or eat it.

Forgot one... "mate with it"

Interface design is still an interesting topic... I just haven't had time to post back here... sometime soon maybe.

Oh, now, that IS interesting. DEC made some nice chips. Still, I'm happy the article points out (so I don't have to do it);

Quote:

-- a move meant to differentiate itself from competition using Intel and other off-the-shelf processors.

While the G series had some very interesting properties I think that near the end of their usage a lot of how they were regarded had more to do with clever marketing then with actual performance.

This makes a lot of sense for Apple, with DEC it will be easier then with the G series to claim people are buying a "super computer" because that's basically what the Alpha DEC's were about so that's good for marketing and BSD has support for their architectures as well.

The next question will obviously be what the actual performance will be like. I'm definitely curious about this._________________Kassen

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